Insecure Writer's Support Group May Edition

Welcome to the May edition of the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

This is a blog hop associated with Alex J. Cavanaugh who created it. Read about it HERE.


Lately, I've been insecure about word count. As my bloated sequel swells to 160,000 words (and yes I'm trying to trim it), I feel more than ever that the editing and rewrites I've done over the last month or so is finally beginning to take shape. In other words...I've reached the point where I can almost say "I have a second draft".

That makes me happy.

But the word count doesn't.

Oh well. I'll read through it one more time to see if there are things I could cut in order to streamline what I want to say in a better way. I hate you word count god. *shakes fist.

***

On Friday, I'll be starting my blog tour beginning with Alex's science-fiction blog. I'll be giving away fun prizes like this SLIPSTREAM spider. I hope you'll stay tuned :)

They really sparkle in the sunlight. Have a great Wednesday.

The Insanity of Zero part 1

During the month of May (and as part of my book tour/promotion), I'm going to serialize some sections of my short story, The Insanity of Zero, for you. I wrote this after I wrote my book that just got published. I hope you like it. It has a lot to do with the same world that SLIPSTREAM takes place in.


Here's part one.

 

The Insanity of Zero

The world died on July 16^th, 1945 in a flash of light at a location about 35-miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico known as the White Sands Proving Ground.  The device responsible for this destruction was called Trinity, and it was an assessment of an implosion-design plutonium weapon. Ground zero was consumed in an atomic fireball and in a mirror universe a deadly burst of electromagnetic radiation erupted into the White Tower. 

The humans of Avalon had lived in a world ruled by technology. However, the White Tower was a thing that defied scientific understanding.  It was a piece of the old mysteries, an artifact that some say was left behind by the ancient ones who had taught the Egyptians how to build the pyramids. Others believed it was the house of god himself. But whatever the White Tower might be, one thing about it remained irrefutable. It rose from the sunbaked deserts of New Mexico higher than Mount Everest. Human memory could not recall a time without it. No one knew what lay inside it; only that any who attempted to enter had never been heard from again. 

Ten miles wide at the base, the structure sundered a land where nothing grew. Rain never fell there, and birds did not circle in the sky. The bitter clay that comprised the desert floor remained shattered and cracked for as far as the eye could see.

It was a place of death.


Part Two can be found by clicking HERE.

I'll post the next paragraph Thursday, so that I don't miss the Insecure Writer's Support Group. :)


Have a great day.

Z.E.R.O.

In the book SLIPSTREAM, the story takes place in two universes separated by a membrane that one crosses by either going through a portal or taking a trip through a mirror. The power to create these doorways comes from one of two sources. The first is Jordan, and I explain where his powers come from in the last chapter of the book. The second is this entity I call Z.E.R.O. The acronym stands for Zion Electronic Ruling Operator...a machine that emerged from a tower that exploded on a mirror planet to Earth.

Z.E.R.O. is an omnipotent machine. His only purpose is to act as a failsafe in the event that for some unforeseeable reason, there was a failure in the containment system of the boxes I spoke of in THIS POST.  Z.E.R.O. saves humanity from extinction. But before he can complete his programming, Z.E.R.O. goes insane.

One of the pitches I used for SLIPSTREAM to get my idea across was a question: What would happen if god had a nightmare? The answer to this is at the core of what Slipstream is about.

During my blog tour coming up in May, I will be posting snippets of a short story that I wrote that describe the Insanity of Z.E.R.O. (probably a paragraph a day).

Thanks to Arlee Bird, Alex, Matthew, Damyanti, and any other organizers I missed for running the A to Z Challenge. It was fun.

Yellow

I think the deepest themes in Wall-E revolve around the color yellow.  Yellow is the sun and it brings the earth life. Wall-E's boxy body is yellow. And one of the promotional pictures that Pixar did for the film was done in Yellow above.

When I think about the them in the film, I think about abandonment. There are lots of examples in real life of families abandoning their children. Oftentimes this happens when a child's sexual orientation is discovered. Here in Utah, gay children are often left to fend for themselves--kicked out onto the street by their parents who are embarrassed, ashamed, and fear that they will be ostracized by their christian community. So in a way...yellow here is cowardice.

In Wall-E, perhaps the color yellow is a symbol of how the human race failed to deal with its pollution problem. They cowardly hid from it within a spaceship, and left a child (robot) behind to process the garbage and to report signs of life that would someday return to the earth.

Yellow is a powerful color. It can be a powerful symbol. However you choose to interpret Wall-E, I think that it sends multiple messages of warning (warning signs are painted in yellow). If anything, we can learn a thing or two from Pixar. These cartoons are not just made for kids.

Xenomorph

Because Prometheus is just around the corner (days are counting down) and I need to talk about something that begins with an "X", I'm choosing to write about the Alien xenomorph.

Most people who have seen the movie Alien find the xenomorph itself pretty disturbing. There is also something totally and undeniably horrifying about the derelict spacecraft in which the eggs are found. The details shown in the sketches of the book "Giger's Alien" imply that the spacecraft (that we see in the Prometheus trailer) has a design and function related to something unimaginably malignant by any human standard of the definition of "malignancy". Perhaps "malignancy" is not even the right word here. The derelict goes beyond that. It encompasses an entire system of systematic obliteration of life which goes beyond any human definition of evil. 

I think it's a good thing that this object (and creature) exists only in our fantasies. I think it would be disturbing to share the universe with a species as terrible and horrific as the one envisioned by H.R. Giger (the creator of the Xenomorph creature).

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As a writer of science-fiction, I've taken many cues from Mr. Giger in my own work. In "Slipstream" I have a god-like being who went insane when his personality split down the middle. The evil side of this god-like being wanted nothing to do with the good, law-abiding side. So much so, that it cut itself in half and replaced the human aspect of itself with machine. Horrific as that may sound, both sides of this avatar survive independently of one another. To know more, well, I hope you'll invest in my book.

Generally speaking, however, it's this sort of characteristic that's a trait of Giger's biomechanical style: I don't think there are many (intelligent) people who would like to see Giger's worlds being realized, because if such was the case, they would be in a heck of a lot of trouble. And the same goes for the dystopian world of Avalon in my book. It's been described as a dark fantasy filled with exciting and original monsters, if not a bit horrific.

But I bow to the master that is H.R. Giger. I wonder how this man (H.R. Giger) even sleeps at night, with the thoughts that must occupy his head.

When It's Time

Tuesday morning I drove up to my childhood home in Idaho Falls to put my mother in a care facility. Now that it's Wednesday night, and I'm writing this completely exhausted from two days of filling out paperwork, moving furniture, and setting up her room, I can tell you that this was the most difficult thing I've had to do in my life.

My mother has been battling mental illness for years. My father had grown incapable of managing her meds and was at the end of his rope, ready to flee with a packed suitcase to lord knows where. He just couldn't take it anymore. And the process was physically exhausting. I hit the road for an eight-hour round trip and had my first care facility appointment at noon. Then another at 1:00. Then a break for lunch and mom's doctor at 3:00 where we asked her, "Do you believe it's time?" And she responded, "Yes."

So we picked out a place, and I got 100-pages of paperwork to fill out (I'm serious). Living will, resuscitation, medicare, insurance, supplemental, social...all kinds of questions. Then came the part where we had to set up the room. This included picking out furniture, moving a 300-pound solid wood dresser, dolls, things that would give my mother some peace in her new home. All the while she was yelling at us, cussing us out, wondering what the hell is going on.  Then she fell twice, once outside. My dad just sat on the couch in a "fugue" state and said "Your mother fell down." And then just left her there so that I could go and scoop her up. He refused to answer simple questions. "Which pillow do you think she would like?" His response, "I'm not going to answer questions about that. Your decision."

He washed his hands of even the simplest questions.

Long-term care insurance had been lost. They were buried in one of three shoeboxes filled with hundreds of paper receipts from voided checks that should have been thrown away to receipts for stuff he's bought in the last ten years. Pure chaos. He couldn't find the keys to his truck, couldn't find my mother's dentures, was pretty helpless really.

So my brother and I did it all. We got my mother's clothes labeled with sharpies, we bought  cleaning supplies and spit-shined all the furniture going over, we selected all the photographs for her door display so that the residents could see who she was and be curious, we put away her clothes, hung the pictures in her room, connected the television, got her set up for her meds to be delivered already in bubble packs directly from the pharmacy with speed pay, signed all the papers, and then took her there.

I got emotional driving her there. She thought we were going to iHop which is one of her favorite restaurants. When we ended up at the nursing home, she knew what this place was, despite all of her mental issues. So I cried...I tried to stop it, but I couldn't.

If you ever have to commit your mother to a facility, I know your pain. My mother loves me so much. Though most of her is gone, this is one of those milestones where you know that a loved one's life left on this earth has grown short. And despite this love, I couldn't take her home. She wanted to go home to the dog she loves, to the place where she was comfortable, and she isn't going to go home ever again. This facility is now her home. I had to move out of state to find a job. I can only visit twice a year because of vacation. And you simply cannot live in this country if you don't have a job. So there's a mandatory 40-hours of my week that is gone. And honestly, there's no way I could care for her even if I lived locally.

So yeah, this week has been hell. I'll remember it for the rest of my life. I think she'll make new friends and lead a healthier more social lifestyle so perhaps this will be a good fit. The home I put her in seemed like a really good one.

Anyway, if I haven't had time to visit your blogs this week, this is why. This is what I've been doing. I've got one more day to wrap up and finalize some things, take my mom to a doctor's appointment, and replace a phone that I dropped accidentally in the hot tub at the hotel I'm staying at. Sigh. When this week is over, it shall be a big relief.

VY Canis Majoris

Our sun in comparison to just a small section of this enormous
star. If you were to carry it out past the edge of the screen, you'd
see how ridiculously huge this star happens to be.

VY Canis Majoris is the largest star ever discovered. I was watching this show called "How the Universe Works" narrated by Mike Rowe, and I really enjoyed the explanation they had of VY Canis Majoris. Basically, it's a dying star. What keeps it burning at its center is a fusion reactor. Think of hydrogen bombs going off and you essentially understand the reaction taking place in the heart of stars.

So the thing that keeps a star from just flying apart is gravity. In the case of VY Canis Majoris, there is so much mass that when the fusion stops going, gravity is just going to kind of take over and crush the core of the star into a black hole.  Black holes are things that our brightest physicists don't really understand.  Places where infinite gravity takes over and time stops and light can't even escape.

So in the center of VY Canis Majoris, a black hole will eventually form. When that happens, it will consume the star from the inside. But it will do so incredibly fast, like a glutton, too fast that all of the colliding matter will explode in this thing called a hypernova. A hypernova produces more energy in a second than our sun will produce in its entire lifetime. That's just mind-boggling.